Sometime during this period, my mother's older brother contracted polio. He was and is a super tall man, very athletic. When going to a physical during his teenage years, a doctor remarked to my grandmother, "So I see your son has had polio in the past. He looks pretty good." My grandmother was shocked. She had been such a protective mommy concerning public places and germs. The miracle for my uncle was that it had not progressed as it usually did, mildly affecting him and giving only the slightest of curves to his spine. Thus it had gone unnoticed for so many years.
Fast forward to the 90's. My father was very dedicated to Rotary International, with seemingly countless years of involvement. Growing up, I observed his love of meaningful service, of making a difference in this world. My father did not just give tons of money to good causes, he was always very personally involved in each Rotary mission. He participated in seven humanitarian Rotoplast missions to South America, helping in transportation of medical crews and personally sterilizing medical equipment to be used for hundreds of life-changing surgeries. Children (and the few adults who survive the condition in third world countries) with cleft lip and palate are frequently ostracized, denied opportunity, even killed for their looks. But with one surgery, all of that goes away, and they can have a normal life. It is a HUGE gift. So to bring such hope really does make an impact in this world. My father loved to be selfless. As he did with the Rotoplast missions, my father was also involved in eradicating polio in nations around the world. Mom and I were swept up into this noble work, and we too assisted in campaigns and teaching public awareness.
It worked.
The moral of the story is that each life matters and influences the whole. Who we choose to be, how we make use of our time -- these are the things that have eternal and lasting significance.
Read about one step forward for man below:
PAIN Relief: India on Track to Be Declared Polio-Free Next Month
For the first time, the polio virus has disappeared from the country for 12 months, but it could still be re-imported from neighboring nations that continue to fight the devastating disease
| January 9, 2012 |
A boy in Firozabad, Uttar Pradesh, India, shows his finger, painted to indicate he has just been vaccinated. Financial support for work that included this photograph came from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.Image: Helen BranswellIn the mid-2000s, when scientists questioned whether the campaign to rid the world of polio could succeed, skeptics pointed to a problem that some called PAIN.
That stood for Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nigeria—the four countries that were stubbornly standing in the way of success. The four had never managed to stop the spread of polioviruses within their borders and continued to send viruses, like embers off a fire, to re-ignite outbreaks in places that had previously halted transmission.
Now it appears someone's going to need to craft a new mnemonic.
India, which once seemed likely to be thelast country on Earth to rid itself of polio, appears to have succeeded ahead of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria in besting the crippling viruses. The last child paralyzed by polio in India got sick on January 13, 2011, and surveillance for wild polioviruses in sewage has not turned up the pathogen in more than a year.
If India produces 12 straight months of polio-free surveillance data, it will be removed from the list of countries where polio is considered endemic, leaving only the other three. A statement hailing that likely eventuality will be issued by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative on the one-year anniversary of the last case later this week. But with the time it takes to process pending laboratory tests, it may be mid-February before there is official word.
Still, there is the sense that India is on the threshold of a momentous achievement, one gained against tremendous odds.
"This is huge for us. It has taken more than a decade and tens of millions of health-workers, managers and a lot of mobilization to get to this point," says Hamid Jafari, project manager for the World Health Organization's National Polio Surveillance Project, based in New Delhi.
After more than a decade battling the virus, and heartbreaking years of seeing the numbers of paralytic cases dip tantalizingly low, only to rebound, some scientists doubted polio could be stopped in India. It was commonly observed that the eradication program had two distinct problems: In Nigeria, where some Muslim parents refused to vaccinate their kids on religious grounds, and in conflict-torn countries like Afghanistan, where safe access is a challenge, the programs were failing to vaccinate all children. In India, however, the failure was on the part of the vaccine.
Where children are well nourished and healthy, three doses of oral polio vaccine will do the trick. But malnourished children who live where sanitation is poor and diarrhea is a fact of daily life cannot mount a protective immune response so easily. In India children who had been vaccinated eight, 10 or more times would sometimes still fall prey to polio.
New vaccines that targeted first one and later two strains of polio, rather than all three, were introduced and began to make real inroads. But the country still faced enormous challenges. In India locating and vaccinating all the vulnerable children is a gargantuan task. In the two poor northern states where polio made its last stand—Uttar Pradesh and Bihar—more than half a million babies are born every month. On the twice-annual national vaccination days, 2.3 million vaccinators visit 209 million households.
"We have to get to these children, these newborns, with vaccine faster than the wild virus can get to them. It's a race against virus," Jafari explains.
In addition to introducing more effective vaccine, India got better at finding high-risk children, homing in on families that move about the country looking for seasonal work. Transit points—train stations, bus depots, busy highway intersections—are used as distribution centers during vaccination campaigns. And special efforts are made to locate and map where migrant families set up camps, to ensure their children are not missed when vaccination teams make their rounds.
Observers heap praise on India for its commitment to the task and the $2 billion it is spending to eliminate polio. "India's success is really the result of visionary determination and dogged persistence," says Liam Donaldson, former head of the U.K.'s Health Protection Agency and chair of an independent expert panel that monitors the polio eradiation effort. "This achievement is thanks to the country's leaders and to many talented and dedicated individuals working both for the government and for its partner agencies."
But D. A. Henderson of the Center for Biosecurity at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who led the campaign to eradicate smallpox, thinks some credit for the resurgence of the global polio effort should be directed toward the founder of Microsoft. "We've got a guy by the name of Bill Gates who has taken this very seriously," Henderson says. "And I think he has done a lot to get attention at high levels in the different governments, India included, which I think has made a big difference."
Challenges remain. The country that formerly exported polioviruses is now vulnerable to re-infection from its neighbors Pakistan and Afghanistan, or beyond. Jafari says each Indian state has drawn up emergency response plans that will kick into gear should that happen. "Our biggest enemy at this time would be complacency and to think the job is done, because the threat of importation is real."
And whereas the challenges faced by other countries still fighting polio are not identical to those India faced, the nation is in a position to share its expertise. Polio workers from India have already gone to other countries to offer help, and more will probably go this year, Jafari says. India's program has also been sharing planning documents and systems devised to ensure performance accountability.
Will India's PAIN partners stop polio by the end of 2012, the latest deadline set by the global initiative? Observers expect India's success to give the entire program a badly needed boost. But the latest report from Donaldson's group suggests only India appears to be on track to meet the 2012 deadline. "The focus needs to be on improving their polio eradication programs," he says of the other countries. "If these were working properly, they would not have polio.
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Rotary celebrates India’s first polio-free year
Watch a video message from RI President Kalyan Banerjee
Rotary club members worldwide are cautiously celebrating a major milestone in the global effort to eradicate polio. India, until recently an epicenter of the wild poliovirus, has gone one year without recording a new case of the crippling, sometimes fatal, disease.
Rotarians and state government leaders in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, vaccinate children against polio during a National Immunization Day in 2011. Photo courtesy of the India PolioPlus Committee
India’s last reported case was a two-year-old girl in West Bengal State on 13 January 2011. The country recorded 42 cases in 2010, and 741 in 2009.
A chief factor in India’s success has been the widespread use of the bivalent oral polio vaccine, which is effective against both remaining types of the poliovirus. Another has been rigorous monitoring, which has helped reduce the number of children missed by health workers during National Immunization Days to less than 1 percent, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Rotary has been a spearheading partner in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative since 1988, along with WHO, UNICEF, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is also a key supporter of the initiative.
Sporting their signature yellow vests and caps, the nearly 119,000 Rotarians in India have helped administer vaccine to children, organize free health camps and polio awareness rallies, and distribute banners, caps, comic books, and other items.
“With the support of their Rotary brothers and sisters around the world, Indian Rotarians have worked diligently month after month, year after year, to help organize and carry out the National Immunization Days that reach millions of children with the oral polio vaccine,” says RI President Kalyan Banerjee, of the Rotary Club of Vapi, Gujarat.
“The achievement of a polio-free India for a full year is a significant step towards a polio-free world -- an example as to what can be accomplished no matter what problems need to be overcome,” says Robert S. Scott, chair of Rotary’s International PolioPlus Committee. “Rotarians of India are and should be proud of the key efforts they have made at all levels, without which the world would not be marking this milestone.”
Deepak Kapur, chair of the India PolioPlus Committee, also credits the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare for its commitment to ending polio. To date, the Indian government has spent more than US$1.2 billion on domestic polio eradication activities. “Government support is crucial if we are to defeat polio, and we are fortunate that our government is our biggest advocate in this effort,” Kapur says.
“Marching ahead, the goal is to sustain this momentum,” he adds, describing as potentially “decisive” the upcoming immunization rounds this month and in February and March.
If all ongoing testing for polio cases recorded through 13 January continues to yield negative results, WHO will declare that India has interrupted transmission of indigenous wild poliovirus, laying the groundwork for its removal from the polio-endemic countries list, which also includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria. However, because non-endemic countries remain at risk for cases imported from endemic countries, immunizations in India and other endemic and at-risk countries must continue. Neighboring Pakistan, which has reported 189 cases so far for 2011, is a major threat to India’s continued polio-free status. Last year, an outbreak in China, which had been polio-free for a decade, was traced genetically to Pakistan.
“As an Indian, I am immensely proud of what Rotary has accomplished,” Banerjee says. “However, we know this is not the end of our work. Rotary and our partners must continue to immunize children in India and in other countries until the goal of a polio-free world is finally achieved.”
For more information:
- Learn about Rotary's efforts to eradicate polio
- See a video about what it takes to eradicate polio
- Help End Polio Now
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